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One of those lost was Aerea Targaryen. On the night of Lord Rogar’s dismissal, Ser Ronnal Baratheon and a dozen of his men forced their way into her chambers in the Red Keep, intending to take her with them … only to find that Queen Alyssa had stolen a march on them. The girl was already gone, and her servants knew not where. It would be learned later that Lord Corbray had removed her, at the Queen Regent’s command. Dressed in the rags of a common girl of the lowest order, with her silver-gold hair dyed a muddy brown, Princess Aerea would spend the rest of the regency working in a stable near the King’s Gate. She was eight years old and loved horses; years later, she would say that this was the happiest time of her life.
Sad to say, there was to be little happiness for Queen Alyssa in the years to come. Her dismissal of her husband as the Hand of the King had destroyed any affection that Lord Rogar might ever have felt for her; from that day forth, their marriage was a ruined castle, an empty shell haunted by ghosts. “Alyssa Velaryon had survived the death of her husband and her two eldest sons, a daughter who perished in the cradle, years of terror under Maegor the Cruel, and a rift with her remaining children, but she could not survive this,” Septon Barth would write, when he looked back upon her life. “It shattered her.”
Contemporary reports from Grand Maester Benifer agree. With Lord Rogar gone, Queen Alyssa named her brother Daemon Velaryon as Hand of the King, dispatched a raven to Dragonstone to tell her son Jaehaerys some (but not all) of what had occurred, and then retired to her chambers in Maegor’s Holdfast. For the remainder of her regency, she left the rule of the Seven Kingdoms to Lord Daemon, and took no further part in public life.
It would be pleasant to report that Rogar Baratheon, once back at Storm’s End, reflected on the error of his ways, repented his mistakes, and became a chastened man. Sadly, that was not his lordship’s nature. He was a man who knew not how to yield. The taste of defeat was like bile in the back of his throat. In war, he would boast, he would ne’er lay down his axe whilst life remained in his body … and this matter of the king’s marriage had become a war to him, one he was determined to win. One last folly remained to him, and he did not shrink from it.
Thus it was that in Oldtown, at the motherhouse attached to the Starry Sept, Ser Orryn Baratheon appeared suddenly with a dozen men-at-arms and a letter bearing Lord Rogar’s seal, demanding that the novice Rhaella Targaryen be turned over to them immediately. When questioned, Ser Orryn would say only that Lord Rogar had urgent need of the girl at Storm’s End. The ploy might well have worked, but Septa Karolyn, who had the door of the motherhouse that day, had a spine of steel and a suspicious nature. Whilst placating Ser Orryn with the pretext of sending for the girl, she sent instead to the High Septon. His High Holiness was (mayhaps fortunately, for both the child and the realm) asleep, but his steward (a former knight, who had been a captain in the Warrior’s Sons until they were abolished) was awake and wary.
In place of a frightened girl, the Baratheon men found themselves confronted by thirty armed septons under the command of the steward, Casper Straw. When Ser Orryn brandished a sword, Straw calmly informed him that twoscore of Lord Hightower’s knights were on their way (a lie, as it happened), whereupon the Baratheons surrendered. Under questioning, Ser Orryn confessed the entire plot: he was to deliver the girl to Storm’s End, where Lord Rogar planned to force her to confess that she was the actual Princess Aerea, not Rhaella. Then he meant to name her queen.
The Father of the Faithful, a man as gentle as he was weak of will, heard Orryn Baratheon’s confession and forgave him. This did not prevent Lord Hightower, once informed, from throwing the captive Baratheons into a dungeon and dispatching a full account of the affair to both the Red Keep and Dragonstone. Donnel Hightower, who had rightly been named Donnel the Delayer for his reluctance to take the field against Septon Moon and his followers, seemed to have no fear of offending Storm’s End by imprisoning Lord Rogar’s own brother. “Let him come and try to prise him free,” he said when his maester worried about how the former Hand might react. “His own wife took his hand and cut his balls off, and soon enough the king will have his head.”
Across the width of Westeros, Rogar Baratheon fumed and raged when he learned of his brother’s failure and imprisonment … but he did not call his banners, as many had feared. Instead he fell into despair. “I am done,” he told his own maester glumly. “It is the Wall for me, if the gods are good. If not, the boy will have my head and make a gift of it to his mother.” Having sired no children by either of his wives, he commanded his maester to draft a will and confession, wherein he absolved his brothers Borys, Garon, and Ronnal of having played any role in his wrongdoing, begged for mercy for his youngest brother, Orryn, and named Ser Borys as heir to Storm’s End. “All I did and all I tried to do was for the good of the realm and the Iron Throne,” he ended.
His lordship would not have long to wait to know his fate. The regency was almost at an end. With the former Hand and Queen Regent both wounded and silent, Lord Daemon Velaryon and the remaining members of the queen’s council ruled the realm as best they could, “saying little and doing less” in the words of Grand Maester Benifer.
On the twentieth day of the ninth moon of 50 AC, Jaehaerys Targaryen reached his sixteenth nameday and became a man grown. By the laws of the Seven Kingdoms, he was now old enough to rule in his own right, with no further need of a regent. All across the Seven Kingdoms, lords and smallfolk alike waited to see what kind of king he would be.
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